Day. Bright, brilliant, horrible day. What were meant to be hours of sleep for the Haruspex were instead wretched hours of tortured wandering. Back in the Aurora Basin, Lochan slept. Ashamin had set out for a long journey and insisted his companion stay behind.

He needed to go south. That was what he'd been told by his own God, and so he had to obey. Even if Ashamin was beginning to feel rejected, as if only a divine afterthought, he would obey. He had to listen, he had to keep his head down in holy presence and up with high spirits and faith. He had to do everything he was told and question it, too, somehow. Unquestioningly questioning.

What the hell kind of a job description was that?

Angrily, Ashamin lashed his tail behind him and let errant sparks fly. There was a crowd gathering before him but with his head hanging low all he saw were scattered sets of hoofprints in sand. He didn't see the God, he didn't want to see anything above the horizon and have to be blinded by the light of a day he'd grown quickly unaccustomed to.

Unluckily for him, the Halycon Flats reflected such light directly into his eyes, lowered even as they were.

The haruspex snapped to attention and saw, then, what he had somehow managed to miss. A God, another holy relic stranding tall and ancient and astride this land as if it were his most prized possession. Below him, hordes of worshippers and strangers. Somehow, the painted buck had found himself in the middle of it all without realizing.

Ashamin bowed as if out of habit, but said nothing because it was not his place to speak. This was the God of the Dragon's Throat, he knew without paying even the slightest attention to the words of those around him. This was Maren's God, the Diviner's jurisdiction.

So where was she? And was she feeling better? Ashamin thought back to the dark unicorn mare, dying in the aftermath of the Wolf God fight, and how the diviner had simply walked away with an air of callousness.

So the real question was this: was Maren feeling less like a soulless figment, now, or would Ashamin remain alone in his sympathetic solitude? And he wondered, too, more fearfully: when would feeling so much get old for him, too?
 
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ASHAMIN